Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

The Obama Presidency Implodes

By Alan Caruba

The first
time I heard the term “military advisors” it was being used by John F. Kennedy
and they were being sent to South Vietnam. A strong anti-communist, in 1961
Kennedy approved financing an increase in the size of the South Vietnamese army
from 150,000 to 170,000 along with sending a thousand U.S. military advisors to
help train them. We all know how the Vietnam War ended.

Earlier,
the North Korean attack on the South had ended in a stalemate. Technically a
state of war still exists.Since 1953,
the U.S. has maintained a military force in South Korea. In the wake of World
War II, we still have a military presence in Europe and Japan to aid in their
defense.

Obama’s
announcement that 300 military advisors are being sent to Iraq is too little,
too late.

As of this
writing Americans are witnessing what happened when Obama withdrew from Iraq
and are anticipating the same result when we withdraw from Afghanistan. Yes, we
were and are war-weary, but we do not like what we’re seeing in Iraq and the
President’s foreign policy failures are compounding by the day.

We are
weary, too, after six and a half years of the presidency of Barack Hussein
Obama. It has taken this long for all the predictions regarding his lack of
experience and competence to come true.

The polls
taken during the past week provide evidence of this. Gallup’s job approval poll
of June 9-15 showed that 42% of “national adults” approved. Over at Rasmussen
Reports, Obama’s job approval on June 21 was 48%. Asked by Rasmussen if the
nation is headed in the right direction or not, 67% of likely voters said it
was not. Reacting to the immigration invasion crisis a Gallup found that 69%
thought he was doing a poor job.

Depending
on events, polls rise and fall, but the numbers indicate a growing loss of confidence
in Obama’s decisions and actions to date. I suspect that what they do not show
is a growing sense of the man as utterly untrustworthy and increasingly distant
from the demands of the office.

We
are witnessing the implosion of the Obama presidency.

All
presidencies have a scandal or two, usually relatively minor in the grand
scheme of national management. Watergate was considered minor initially and
took two years to materialize into the scandal that forced Nixon to resign.
Obama, however, has generated directly and indirectly enough scandals for their
combined weight to begin being noticed even by those who pay little attention
to Washington, D.C.

The worst
of the latest has been the revelation of how the Internal Revenue Service was
politicized to attack organizations that were deemed to be affiliated with the
Tea Party movement and patriotic objectives. The “loss” of Lois Lerner's emails
and others smells of the destruction of evidence Congress has demanded. The one
element of the government that virtually all Americans interact with is the IRS.

Other
scandals like Solyndra, representing the waste of billions on wind and solar
companies, many of which went bankrupt after receiving all manner of grants and
loans, did not registered in a similar fashion. The wiretapping of Associated
Press reporters’ phone calls likewise did not evoke widespread concern. The
failure of the “stimulus” that spent billions without producing an uptick in
the economy was seen as just another way the government wastes our money. Even
“Fast and Furious” in which thousands of weapons were purchased and transferred
to Mexican drug cartels did not evoke more than a short expression of dismay.

Benghazi,
however, in which a U.S. ambassador died along with three others, remains an
unresolved scandal as much for the lies about a video as its cause as for the
tragedy of the abandonment of those killed. The release of five leaders of the
Taliban from Guantanamo without letting Congress know has piled on the previous
scandals to a point where serious concerns about both Obama’s judgment have arisen.

What
remains now is a combination of the President’s increasing use of Executive
Orders to create as much mischief as possible along with the perception that he
simply does not care what Americans in general and Congress in particular
thinks about what he is doing. There is talk in the House of bringing a legal
suit against the President regarding his heavy use of Executive Orders to
bypass Congress while initiating policies that require congressional inclusion
and oversight.

Those of
us who pay close attention to what the President is doing know that the
ultimate aim of his actions in office has been to harm the nation in a variety
of ways from reducing our military to pre-World War Two levels to destroying a
large element of the nation’s electrical energy supply by forcing coal-fired plants
out of business.

Ultimately,
the implosion of the Obama presidency has been the realization that he has put
the nation at risk of the world’s bad actors by causing America’s global
leadership position to erode. Americans have been accustomed to being a leading
military and economic power since the end of World War Two and he has been
undermining that in every way possible.

Voter
payback is likely to see a major shift of political power in Congress away from
the Democratic Party in the forthcoming midterm elections and would enable
Republicans to slow or stop further damage to the nation. Failing that, the
fate of the nation will be a great risk.

Obama has generated, directly and indirectly, enough scandals for their combined weight to justify his impeachment and trial for high crimes and misdemeanors.

If ANY GOP President had done or cause 10% of the BS that Obama has the nation would be demanding his head on a platter... But.

Yes, the dreaded BUT... But the Congress as a whole is less respected and trusted than is Barack Hussein Obama and until BOTH Houses are taken over and run by men of principle, this is the best we can expect I fear..

Comrade Obama is just getting warmed up my friends - we ain't seen nothing yet. The Communists have worked patiently for nearly 100 yrs for this and they got it - their man at the very top of most powerful nation on earth. They will not fail to complete the revolution. See you guys in the gulags.

He’s displayed levels of incompetence and stupidity that are virtually unparalleled in American Presidential history - and we’ve had some doozies - yet 42% still like him. All things considered... his numbers are actually quite good. Goes to show what a corrupt media can do.

The North did not take South Vietnam until 2 years after USA left.The North took two years to recover and raise a new army successfully taking the South with the famous footage of the fall of the American Embassy the medias final triumph. Never mind that the Embassy marines killed everyone from the tank before they got across the lawn. America should have stayed the course in Vietnam as they did in Japan and South Korea but no, the people demanded a return of all soldiers and Obama repeats the mistakes of history past condemning Nations to the slavery of despotism.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.